These arguments of Baldwin abundantly emphasize the wide-reaching limitations of thinking caused by language.[25] These limitations are of the greatest significance, both subjectively and objectively; at least their meaning is great enough to force one to ask one’s self if, after all, in regard to independence of thought, Franz Mauthner, thoroughly sceptical, is not really correct in his view that thinking is speech and nothing more. Baldwin expresses himself more cautiously and reservedly; nevertheless, his inner meaning is plainly in favor of the primacy of speech (naturally not in the sense of the spoken word); the directed thinking, or as we might perhaps call it, the thinking in internal speech, is the manifest instrument of culture, and we do not go astray when we say that the powerful work of education which the centuries have given to directed thinking has produced, just through the peculiar development of thinking from the individual subjective into the social objective, a practical application of the human mind to which we owe modern empiricism and technic, and which occurs for absolutely the first time in the history of the world. Inquisitive minds have often tormented themselves with the question why the undoubtedly extraordinary knowledge of mathematics and principles and material facts united with the unexampled art of the human hand in antiquity never arrived at the point of developing those known technical statements of fact, for instance, the principles of simple machines, beyond the realm of the amusing and curious to a real technic in the modern sense. There is necessarily only one answer to this; the ancients almost entirely, with the exception of a few extraordinary minds, lacked the capacity to allow their interest to follow the transformations of inanimate matter to the extent necessary for them to be able to reproduce the process of nature, creatively and through their own art, by means of which alone they could have succeeded in putting themselves in possession of the force of nature. That which they lacked was training in directed thinking, or, to express it psychoanalytically, the ancients did not succeed in tearing loose the libido which might be sublimated, from the other natural relations, and did not turn voluntarily to anthropomorphism. The secret of the development of culture lies in the _mobility of the libido_, and in its capacity for transference. It is, therefore, to be assumed that the directed thinking of our time is a more or less modern acquisition, which was lacking in earlier times.